Laura Ingalls Wilder’s semi-autobiographical series Little House on the Prairie tells the simple but sprawling story of a young pioneer girl and her family as they journey across the American frontier in the 1880s. First published during the Great Depression, the novels have since been fairly criticized for their depiction of Native Americans, but this troubling aspect hasn’t diminished their popularity (they’re beloved by the feminist writer Roxane Gay and the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin alike). Today, the books disturb me as much as they move me—but as a kid, I longed for someone to develop the technology to print Little House on the backs of my eyelids, so that no matter what I was doing I could always be with Laura, racing ponies across the prairie or making maple sugar candy in the Big Woods.

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I read the novels almost continuously from ages 6 to 10. I put on a bonnet to play Little House and wore a nightcap to bed so I could sleep Little House. I’m not sure where, exactly, a book ends and a reader begins, but I know that as a kid I did my best to make that dividing line very fuzzy. Little House helped me to hold myself back from the 1980s of my childhood, and allowed at least a small part of me to grow up in the 1880s—or at least the 1880s as remembered in the 1930s. This may be why I sometimes feel a little bit “out of time,” if not out of place, in 2016. For one thing, I’m convinced that Little House has prevented me from becoming an emotionally on-trend woman who “leans in” and “lives her personal truth.”

Instead of following Oprah or Sheryl Sandberg, I have—for better and worse—heeded the stoic wisdom of Wilder, who writes in Little Town on the Prairie that “grown-up people must never let feelings be shown by voice or manner.” In other words: I’m passive-aggressive, I secretly pursue my own agenda, and—the greatest of self-care sins—I hide my feelings. As an adult, I’m baffled by the stars of reality dating shows like The Bachelor, less by their appetite for public scrutiny than by their fluency in an emotional vernacular that feels both evangelical and alien. Over candlelit dinners, contestants confess their love and relate traumatic stories in order to prove they’re “ready to open up and be vulnerable.” While Little House and The Bachelor are forms of reality-based fiction, autobiographical works like the former are usually associated with self-expression. But across eight volumes and hundreds of pages, Wilder and her characters repeatedly tout the dangers of sharing your feelings. Over the years, I’ve come to accept this sentiment’s many pitfalls, while trying to better understand the historical and cultural value it held for pioneers like the Ingalls family.

Wilder expects not only her characters, but also her readers, to understand that displays of emotion are inappropriate. In Little House on the Prairie, when the girls must bid a final farewell to their friend Mr. Edwards, a six-year-old Laura accidentally shows emotion—or, as Wilder puts it, she “forgets to be polite.” Laura breaks prairie protocol by exclaiming passionately: “‘Oh Mr. Edwards, I wish you wouldn’t go away!’” Later, when her younger sister Carrie dares to hope that Laura’s boyfriend Almanzo will survive a mission into the frozen hellscape of The Long Winter, the more-mature Laura stays quiet because giving voice to her feelings “would not make any difference.” Throughout the series, Laura understands that part of growing up means learning to keep “a stiff upper lip.”

I’m convinced that Little House has prevented me from becoming an emotionally on-trend woman who “lives her personal truth.”

It’s a lesson Laura carries with her into the last book of the series, These Happy Golden Years. Her emotional restraint—and maturation—culminates in her engagement to Almanzo, which is accomplished without discussion of feelings. Mid-buggy ride, Almanzo asks Laura if she would “like an engagement ring.” She replies, “That would depend on who offered it to me.” He specifies: Would she like an engagement ring from him? It would depend, she tells him coyly, on the ring. When Almanzo returns with a ring, Laura approves it, saying only, “I think ... I would like to have it” (ellipses Wilder’s).

The sentiment in Laura’s acceptance is contained entirely in the ellipses—in what the Bachelorette star Ashley Hebert called, “the dot-dot-dot,” after a departing contestant left open the possibility of a future relationship with her by mysteriously saying, “Who knows ...” In the universe of the Bachelorette, any emotional omission, any vagueness of feeling, is ferreted out immediately. Log-cabin-style emotional withholding is not tolerated in the Bachelor Mansion, where the producers are quick to arrange for a confrontation that might devolve into a profession of love, a profusion of tears, or a dip in the hot tub. Of course, there are no ardent love scenes—and no hot tubs—in Little House.

I grew up 45 miles from Wilder’s birthplace in Pepin, Wisconsin, a part of the world where people spend their whole lives in the “dot-dot-dot.” We try not to bother others with our feelings, and we leave a lot unsaid. In one (perhaps extreme) example: A family friend, an elderly woman, woke up at 3 a.m. with chest pains. She thought about calling 9-1-1, but decided not to. If the ambulance came, the siren might wake the neighbors. She considered calling her kids, but she didn’t want to worry them. So she drove herself to the emergency room. When she arrived, she opted not to take one of the parking spots close to the entrance, because someone else might need it. For so many of us in Wilder country, emergencies happen to other people.

Woven into this extreme reluctance to burden others is an emphasis on self-sufficiency—yet another hallmark of the pioneer spirit Wilder advocates in her books. Always critical of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, she gave a 1937 speech in which she recalled a frontier where “neither [her family] nor their neighbors begged for help. No other person, nor the government, owed them a living ... we need today courage, self reliance and integrity.” Good humor and cheerfulness spur that all-important courage, Wilder argued. It’s how families like hers boosted their morale and avoided succumbing to the despair of prairie life, as Mrs. Brewster does one winter night, screaming at her husband, seizing a butcher knife, and threatening to kill herself if he won’t take her back East.

By quashing feelings and swapping smiles, the Ingalls family made frontier hardship endurable.

In These Happy Golden Years, Wilder gives readers a perfect contrast between Laura—who adheres to the cardinal value of emotional repression—and the sulky, gravy-stained Mrs. Brewster, who Laura stays with one winter while teaching at a prairie school. At first, it hurts Laura’s feelings when Mrs. Brewster doesn’t return her “good morning.” But Laura learns a valuable lesson from Mrs. Brewster’s sullenness: It’s the Ingalls family’s cheerful exchange of greetings that makes the morning good. By quashing feelings and swapping smiles, the Ingalls family made frontier hardship endurable.

Years after reading those books, I moved to Madrid to teach school, just as Laura moved far from her family’s home on the frontier. I discovered that living far away can give you perspective on the unique emotional economy of your home. I couldn’t seem to make anything work in Madrid. I spoke Spanish, but no one understood me, and I never got what I wanted. I think this was because I spoke Spanish in ellipses—that is, I tried to leave things unsaid, the way I would in English. People didn’t give me things, because I wouldn’t dare ask.

Carrying around the belief that asking for help somehow amounts to weakness hasn’t always served me well, especially in other cultural contexts. When I was moving back to the U.S., an issue with the airline delayed me for several days. Spanish airport-security agents, who had watched me repeatedly and politely fail to get a seat on a flight to the States, finally took me aside and explained that I needed to go up to the Iberia desk, take hold of the counter, and yell and cry without stopping until I got what I wanted. I was shocked. I couldn’t do it, I told them. So they rallied two other passengers to stand behind me and support me while I became Mrs. Brewster (minus the knife). Within a few hours, I flew home. I’m still grateful to those strangers who boosted my morale, not with their cheerfulness but with their indignation.

Not daring to ask is a hallmark of the pioneer spirit Wilder advocates in her books.

There are more insidious downsides to Wilder’s approach. The Minnesota-based activist writing collective Of Nine Minds criticizes Little House on the Prairie culture, linking emotional repression to political oppression. The group points out that the stakes of expressing feelings have always been higher for people of color, and that a culture of “niceness” only exacerbates this problem. Further, it’s hard to advocate for yourself when good people aren’t supposed to ask directly for what they want; it’s hard to bring attention to serious grievances when you’re not supposed to express negative feelings. Indeed, how are we supposed to make the world a better place when we can’t complain?

At the same time, I’m reluctant to travel too far from Little House. I still think there is some modern value in the kind of emotional socialism Wilder proposes, where everyone sacrifices personal gratification for the greater good. I moved back to Wisconsin last year, after a decade living away from the Midwest. I notice that when I go out in public, my body feels relaxed. I’m not bracing for someone to honk their horn at me when I’m trying to cross the street, or for the cashier at TJ Maxx to holler “NEXT!” in an impatient tone of voice. Everyone I smile at smiles back, and I don’t care if the smile is sincere. I know that people here sincerely want to be liked, which may have been why no one here voted for Donald Trump in the primary. Growing up, we learned that people who don’t care if they’re liked—who don’t show consideration of the feelings of others—don’t deserve to be.

The presumptive Republican candidate is a natural byproduct of an economy where individuals are expected to optimize their potential through their virtual self-presentation—reality-based fiction—in much the way Laura’s father, Pa Ingalls, optimized his wheat harvest with a machine thresher. In the age of social media, it may be time to update Wilder’s aphorism: Grown-up people must always leverage their feelings in order to promote their personal brands. In this context, Wilder-style restraint seems quaint, even childish.

When I was a kid reading Little House, I hoped one day to grow out of my feelings, to buckle on my emotional corset, handle adversity with grace, and never disappoint those I loved with my bad moods. Instead I turned into a writer. My work makes self-disclosure a daily question. I still wonder how to write about my feelings when I’m not sure if they are mine or Laura’s, if they are something to do with me or something to do with my upbringing, or the stories I loved as a child. I wonder if I am a grown-up, and if so, by whose standards. I wish I felt confident that I have the best words, but I’m glad I wonder whether they’re worth saying.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

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The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”